1. Field of the invention
The present invention relates to general purpose component/equipment support systems and, more particularly, to a universal system of interlocking blocks and rods or tubing for allowing rapid prototyping of test assemblies, lab bench setups and other equipment infrastructures.
2. Description of the Background
During any experiment or project in basic or applied research, product development or assembly management, a preliminary and final test setup is required. These test setups inflate product development costs due to the material costs and man-hours that go into modeling and prototyping. Bench fixtures, components and equipment often need to be installed on a specific infrastructure and with tight tolerances. Traditionally, these infrastructures needed to be custom designed, custom manufactured, and permanently assembled. This required a separate design facility (e.g., CAD design), a manufacturing facility, and an assembly facility. For example, FIG. 1 illustrates a conventional optical bench test setup in which a laser is transmitted to a mirror at point A, is reflected to a mirror at point B, then to another at point C, another at point D, and is finally reflected outward from the setup. Each mirror must be adjustable, yet capable of being precisely fixed in position. In order to facilitate the necessary adjustments yet maintain the proper tolerances, each component of the supporting infrastructure must be custom designed, manufactured and assembled. The cost is enormous and unduly inflates the ultimate product cost. Moreover, significant time is wasted waiting for custom parts and fixtures and in assembling the experimental infrastructure. Once assembled, the custom fixtures do not lend themselves to modification and re-tooling. Any changes to the infrastructure sends it back to the design facility where the process must be repeated. Traditionally, an extraordinarily large portion of the ultimate product cost was devoted to the test infrastructure. But these single-purpose (task-specific) custom fixtures usually have no usefulness after the product development stage and are discarded.
Clearly, there would be great economies in a universal system which could increase productivity and reduce costs by allowing such fixtures, models and prototypes to be assembled in a short time from a small inventory of standardized parts, thereby shortening the design and fabrication lead time and expense, and allowing easy modification, adjustment and re-tooling.
Of course, the broader concept of construction via standard components has been used in other unrelated applications. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,493,435 issued to Archambault is directed to a set of toy building blocks (see column 1, lines 3, 4). The fundamental units of the Archambault system are cubes (see column 2, lines 23, 24, 25), and interfitting rods that "hold together a structure built from the blocks" (column 5, lines 28, 29). The rods are secured to the cubes by a frictional fit, and a fabricated structure will appear as an assembly of interfaced cubes with hidden rods. This is targeted for entirely different application. The rod and cube layout and dimensions are not calculated to provide a framework to support anything, and the system is not capable of providing reliable nor adjustable support for equipment.
Nevertheless, it would be greatly advantageous to carry the concept over into equipment support infrastructures. With structural modifications and refinements, this goal is herein achieved to provide a universal system capable of allowing fixtures, models and prototypes to be assembled in a short time from a small inventory of standardized parts. Design and fabrication times can be slashed, and easy modification, adjustment and re-tooling becomes possible.